Status of the tandem FEL project development in Israel

The authors report the status of a collaborative research project development aimed toward construction of an IR FEL based on the EN tandem electrostatic accelerator of the Weizmann Institute of Science. A preliminary feasibility demonstration project yielded encouraging progress in three aspects: (1) Electron gun and accelerator conversion: A 50-kV 1-A electron gun injector was designed, built, tested, and assembled on the 6-MeV tandem accelerator which was previously converted and conditioned to operate as an electron accelerator in a positively charged HV terminal configuration. Contrary to the configuration of the only electrostatic accelerator FEL demonstrated so far, the electron gun and multistage depressed collector are connected to the ground, and the wiggler is placed in the HV terminal of the straight geometry tandem accelerator. This configuration promises to provide a high current high quality e-beam. (2) Electron-beam transport: The first installation of the electron optical beam recovery system yielded transport efficiency of 80%. Substantial improvement is expected with planned electron optics modifications. An effect, highly significant for realizing long pulse (quasi-cw) FEL operation, was observed experimentally. Due to the damping effect of the accelerator column capacitance network, the voltage terminal stayed constant for milliseconds even with poor beam transport efficiency. This points to the possibility of developing a long pulse FEL which may operate at a single longitudinal mode. (3) Wiggler development: A conventional 4.4-cm period SmCo planar wiggler was acquired and evaluated using a recently constructed floating wire magnetic field measurement setup